Posted updated 11/14/2025
In the food and beverage industry, you live by your margins, facing pressure from FSMA compliance, perishable inventory, and complex logistics. Recognizing this, you invested heavily in a powerful ERP system, expecting it to streamline everything.
So why are your teams still stuck manually keying in 10-page invoices or re-typing PDF purchase orders? Why is your cash flow frozen, held hostage by a missing paper BOL?
The problem isn’t your ERP. It’s the “digital gap” – the ocean of paper, PDFs, and manual tasks surrounding it – that’s quietly sabotaging your entire operation. This article explores what’s behind this issue and what you can do about it.
Digital Transformation in Food: Why Your ERP is Only Half the Solution
A $200,000 shipment of perishable goods is on the loading dock, but the Bill of Lading (BOL) is missing a signature. By the time the paper is tracked down, the delivery slot is missed, the customer issues a chargeback, and your cash flow is frozen for another 72 hours.
Sound familiar?
In the high-volume, low-margin food and beverage world, speed and accuracy aren’t just goals – they’re survival. Many F&B companies recognized this and invested heavily in powerful ERPs (like NetSuite, SAP, or Microsoft Dynamics), expecting to solve these exact problems.
And yet, their teams are still drowning in paper, PDFs, and endless manual data entry.
Here’s the hard truth: While many food & beverage companies invest heavily in ERP platforms, they fail to achieve true efficiency or unlock cash flow because they ignore the paper-based “digital gaps” in critical workflows like AP, sales orders, and logistics. The key to growth and compliance is not replacing the ERP, but implementing a deeply integrated document automation strategy – a task that requires expert implementation, not just out-of-the-box software.
1. The “Digital Island”: Why Your ERP Is Stranded by Paper
The core problem is that your ERP has become a “digital island”. It can’t manage the messy, unstructured data – the paper invoices, PDF purchase orders, and scanned BOLs – that starts and ends every single process in your business.
2. The “First Mile” Failure: Manual Data Ingestion
Your ERP is fantastic at storing data, but it’s terrible at getting it. The “first mile” of every process – a vendor invoice, a customer PO, a BOL – still relies on a human to manually read, interpret, and key in data from a piece of paper or PDF.
Think about it: an AP automation clerk spends 20 minutes manually keying line-item data from a 10-page produce invoice into your ERP, just trying to match it to a PO.
This isn’t just slow; it’s incredibly expensive. According to IOFM, “Manual invoice processing can cost an organization $8.78 per invoice”, which is often due to the hidden expenses of data entry errors, lost documents, and delayed approvals. These inefficiencies can also severely strain vendor relationships, leading to missed early payment discounts, and incurring late payment fees. (read more about the real cost of processing an invoice).
3. The “Last Mile” Bottleneck: Disconnected Approvals & Logistics
The “last mile” is just as broken. An order might be sitting in the ERP, but the corresponding Bill of Lading or Proof of Delivery is a separate paper document floating around the warehouse. A purchase requires a manager’s signature, but they’re on the plant floor, not at their desk.
For example, a sales order gets entered, but the warehouse team has to wait for a physical pick-list to print. That list then travels with a paper BOL, which then must be scanned back in days later just to trigger the invoice. The delay is literally built into the process.
4. The Result: Zero Visibility, Costly Errors, and Stagnant Cash
This system creates massive data silos. You can’t trust your ERP’s “real-time” dashboard because you know it’s 48 hours behind reality. This lag directly freezes your cash flow and leads to compliance gaps, vendor disputes, and those dreaded customer chargebacks.
Unfreezing Cash Flow: Automating Your Two Most Critical Cycles
The solution isn’t to rip out your ERP. It’s to build the digital bridges that finally connect it to your real-world processes. This starts with automating your two most critical cash flow cycles: Procure-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash.
Franklin Foods: A Complete Food Manufacturing Transformation
Franklin Foods, a leading food processor, faced the same challenges plaguing the industry: manual invoice processing eating into margins, credit memo chaos disrupting cash flow, and paper-based processes creating compliance risks and sustainability concerns.
Their transformation started with AP automation but quickly expanded across their entire operation:
- Accounts Payable Impact: Invoice processing time plummeted from 45 minutes per invoice to under 8 minutes – an 82% reduction in processing time. This efficiency unlocked $180,000 annually in early-pay discounts they’d previously been too slow to capture. But the real breakthrough came when they tackled their most frustrating bottleneck: credit memos.
- Credit Memo Workflow Automation: Returns and adjustments had been a nightmare – paper forms moving between departments, manual calculations prone to errors, and zero visibility into outstanding credits. Automated credit memo workflows eliminated the chaos. Digital forms route automatically through the approval chain, calculations happen instantly, and every adjustment creates a complete audit trail. The finance team now reconciles credits in minutes instead of days, and vendor relationships improved as disputes resolved faster.
- Sustainability & Compliance Benefits: The environmental impact was substantial. By eliminating paper invoices, credit memos, and manual filing systems, Franklin Foods reduced their document-related paper consumption by an estimated 75,000 sheets annually – equivalent to approximately 9 trees per year. Digital workflows also strengthened their FSMA compliance posture, providing instant access to transaction histories during audits and enabling rapid traceability for food safety incidents.
- The Cultural Transformation: Perhaps most impressive was the staff adoption. Warehouse teams embraced digital BOLs on tablets, AP clerks redirected their time from data entry to vendor relationship management, and finance leadership gained real-time visibility they’d never had before. The shift from “this is how we’ve always done it” to “why didn’t we do this sooner?” happened within the first quarter.
Discover the complete Franklin Foods transformation including their credit memo automation breakthrough and cultural adoption story.
The Compliance & Logistics Linchpin: Digitizing the Bill of Lading (BOL)
In the F&B world, the BOL is everything. It’s a legal document, a critical traceability record (vital for FSMA compliance), and the ultimate trigger for payment.
A paper BOL process is a massive compliance risk. Integrated bill of lading automation connects your ERP’s sales order directly to a digital BOL and Proof of Delivery (POD) system.
This gives you a complete, digital audit trail from order to delivery, making recalls and audits simple. You can also fight chargebacks instantly by providing an indisputable, time-stamped POD.
Quick Question: How much time did your team spend last month chasing down missing BOLs or manually matching them to invoices?
Why Your IT Team Can't DIY This: The Myth of "Out-of-the-Box"
This is the moment where many teams say, “Our ERP has a module for that,” or “We can just buy a plugin.” At Mosaic, we’ve seen how this approach quickly becomes an expensive setback.
The "Good Enough" Plugin Trap
Many ERPs offer basic scanning or “document management” modules. But these generic tools are exactly that: generic. They don’t have the Mosaic-level intelligence built to understand the specific complexities of the food manufacturing industry. They can’t natively handle variable-weight items, complex pricing contracts, vendor-specific invoice formats, or multi-part Bills of Lading (BOLs).
Our implementation experts have seen companies waste hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to force-fit out-of-the-box tools. The result is always the same: another piece of “shelfware” that doesn’t truly integrate, forcing your team right back to their old, manual paper processes and spreadsheets.
The "Implementation-First" Imperative
Here’s the secret the software world ignores: technology is only 20% of the solution. The other 80% is the implementation.
This is Mosaic’s differentiator, and it’s why our clients succeed where others fail. The value isn’t just our cloud-based solutions; it’s the world-class implementation experts who provide:
- Deep Workflow Analysis: We don't just deploy software; we map your exact workflows—from the receiving dock to the finance department - to identify bottlenecks and configure the system precisely to your needs.
- Custom Configuration: Our experts tune the software to understand the nuances of your business, from specific product codes to unique vendor rules.
- Seamless ERP Integration: We guarantee a bulletproof connection between your specific ERP and surrounding systems (like your WMS or TMS).
We guarantee the technology maps to your real-world processes and delivers the desired outcome. It’s the essential 80% your internal IT team – who are generalists, not food industry process specialists—simply cannot provide.
Stop Blaming Your ERP
It’s time to stop blaming your ERP for your inefficiencies. The real bottleneck is the disconnected paper and manual processes surrounding it. These “digital gaps” are quietly draining your cash flow, increasing your compliance risk, and preventing your F&B business from scaling.
Fixing this isn’t just an “IT project” – it’s a core business strategy. By focusing on expert-led, integrated food and beverage document automation for AP, sales orders, and logistics, you create a single, seamless, and visible workflow that finally unlocks the full power of your ERP investment. Ready to see exactly where your processes are failing and how much it’s costing you?
Let's eliminate those bottlenecks
Don’t buy another software. Invest in a guaranteed outcome. Schedule a free, workflow analysis with a Mosaic implementation expert today. We’ll show you exactly how we can integrate with your existing ERP to solve your top 3 paper bottlenecks in less time.
